Ricky Stenhouse Jr. currently sits 24th in the 2025 NASCAR Cup series points table with just two top-10 finishes to his name. His performance comes with the newly formed Hyak Motorsports in the No. 47 Chevrolet Camaro ZL1. Hyak Motorsports is a single-car team and this brings challenges that bigger fish like Hendrick Motorsports and Joe Gibbs Racing don’t have to face.
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Stenhouse spoke about this in a recent interview with Frontstretch magazine. He said that the positive of being a driver for a single-car team is that all the attention is on the feedback that he alone provides. However, on the downside, the team has to work with fewer data points than they would have with more drivers.
In his words, “We come here and we got one data point. We don’t have four data points. Every race that goes, I feel you get a little bit further behind. So, it’s just difficult to progress as a single-car team trying to keep up with everybody else. So, I think our guys are doing a good job with what we got. It’s just very difficult and tough. But we’re up for the challenge.”
NASCAR does its best to help such teams stand up to the bigger teams. The Next-Gen car, introduced in 2022, was an initiative taken to enforce parity across the field. But even with such measures, there is still a certain degree of advantage that multi-car teams have, as Stenhouse has pointed out.
How NASCAR reduced practice times to help single-car teams
Practice sessions in the Cup Series used to be much longer than the 20-minute track time that is provided now ahead of race day. The reason for this limit is to reduce the advantage that multi-car teams hold over single-car teams.
Stenhouse explained this to Autoweek in 2024. “If you start stretching that (practice) out, the big teams definitely, I think, start collecting more data on a weekend and can send all four cars in a different direction and kind of hone in on something. In 20 minutes, it’s tough for them to run that many different setups and then change it for qualifying and the race,” he said.
In some cases, he wishes that the practice sessions were at least a bit longer. Stenhouse is also aware that less practice time would hurt the chances of rookie drivers. But those issues, he believes, can be addressed through other solutions. Putting the single-car teams on equal footing with the big teams remains his top priority.
